16th February 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Holy fuck. Sometimes, you want a racket, because it blows away all the shit, the, the anxiety, the bewilderment, all the other messy crap that is life right now. And I do mean right now: not ‘the twenty-first century’, not the 2020s – although the last five years has been a relentless pummelling of awful, awful stuff – but this is the immediate present we’re looking at here. ‘Unprecedented’ is a word we hear a lot. But we really do live in times which are unprecedented. Waking up every morning wondering what fresh new hell has happened in the hours since you went to bed, wondering if the world still exists and if you have really woken up or if this is all a hellish nightmare is gruelling.
With UPSIDEYERHEAD, PLQ MRX deliver that racket. Their bio tells it that ‘From the depths of North Philadelphia’s underground comes PLQ MRX, a project operating at the intersection of abrasive noise rock, acid-soaked psychedelia, and warped funk’. Say what? We go on to learn that ‘Beyond the music itself, PLQ MRX cultivate an aesthetic steeped in excess, altered states, and grotesque carnival imagery. Their world is populated by surreal characters and exaggerated rituals, exploring pleasure, debauchery, and sensory overload. The band leans into both the highs and the ugly turns of the trip, embracing chaos as a core element of its identity’.
When we discover that PLQ MRX have emerged from ‘the remnants of the Philadelphia collective Plaque Marks, who first surfaced in 2017 with the EP Anxiety Driven Nervous Worship’ and that the current lineup features current and former members of Author & Punisher, UNSANE and SWANS (having been joined by Vinnie Signorelli for this release), it all makes sense.
And yes, it’s every bit as wild as the amalgamation of ‘abrasive noise rock, acid-soaked psychedelia, and warped funk’ would have you expect.
‘Us V. Them’ crashes in with some wild, frenetic jazz action before a thunderous riff crashes in, drums and bass to the fore, guitar a wah-wah laden blitzkrieg that calls to mind The Stooges. The vocals – half-spoken, half-spat, thick with distortion and swamped in reverb, sit almost on another plane, growling and snarling away amidst the maelstrom. Making out the lyrics isn’t easy, but feeling the vibe zaps straight to the very core instantaneously.
There’s a dirty, low-slung swaggering groove to ‘Gansta White Walls’, which locks into a heavy bass-led workout and grinds away, building layers of depth a couple of minutes or so in before hitting the ‘frenzied, motorik’ pedal, while the eight-and-a-half minute ‘Gentrify My Skull’ is a brawling, squalling sludgy stoner doom monster, littered with scrappy samples and as ugly as hell, with mangled-to-fuck vocals and a relentlessly gut-churning bass, and bursting into a full-throttle blast of black metal at the end.
The final track, ‘Hundred Dollar Hot Dog’ is the album’s shortest, but packs the most into a mere three and a half minutes. It really does seem to be a song about an expensive hot dog, and brings the rage in spades, with a lengthy refrain of ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you’ amidst a squall of guitar and an all-pervading dense murk.
It’s rare to hear a release that doesn’t sound like anything else, but with UPSIDEYERHEAD, PLQ MRX have done it. It’s crazed, outside the box racketmongering of the highest order. It might be genius, it might be madness, but it’s absolutely head-spinningly awesome.
AA
Aural Aggravation 